Let us dream of a new world, a new world we will create ourselves. A new world that is within our reach if we but reach out and grasp it.

Let us dream of what we can do with our technology, soon, very soon. It will be a world where you what you see and hear is what you choose to see and hear. It is a world where the anomie of modern life will give way to a mesh of relationships based on common interests and real values. It will be a world where who you are isn’t based on your credentials, isn’t based on your money, but is based on who you know and what you have done.

I have called it The Flash Society in the past – a world where help is a word away, where tribes and guilds enmesh their members in a web of friendship, obligation, duty and protection. The technology is almost here, and the social norms are already changing.

Imagine then that everything is transmitting. You are transmitting your location and whatever other information you choose to transmit. Every shop, every house, every road, every car, every item in every store – indeed everything manufactured or tagged, is tagged with information.

You wear a PDA on your wrist with a full screen, or for the truly daring a pair of visors. That PDA or visor is set both to transmit and to receive – and more importantly than receiving to screen. For in a world where every store is transmitting its location, what it sells, and its specials; in a world where all the roads are transmitting their current traffic load; in a world where those in your tribe are letting you know if they are busy, available, or inviting you to join them for a party, movie, coffee or conversation – in such a world, as with the internet today, the problem is getting the information you want.

So as you walk, shopping, you set your PDA to tell you what stores are selling shoes, to show their location relative to you, and to show any specials on men’s wingtip dress shoes. If you are a fireman, your PDA is automatically downloading the fire code history, floor map and water main locations of buildings and with a simple command they come up for you. Because that information is encrypted only people like yourself, police and building inspectors can see it.

Information is presented the same way it often is today in computer games – in iconic form or as simplified colors. Choose to see all the restaurants in a few blocks and each one might come up as a symbol – the brighter it is the closer it is, the more green it is on a spectrum of red to green the more expensive it is, and the symbol itself varies by the type of food – perhaps a fleur de lise for French food, golden arches for fast food, and a fortune cookie for Chinese.

In such a world, the world you see is the world you need to see at any given time. Those who need directions see both a minimap, but also a line running in the direction they need to go. Those who are heading to Customs see a list of the documents they need, those who want food or to find a lawyer see that. And a policeman sees those who have called for help – but they don’t see him on their display unless he chooses to let them.

This expands deeply into the work world. Imagine doing inventory in such a world – you look at each section in order and your PDA does the counting for you. Indeed, depending on transmitter power you might be able to take inventory without ever leaving your office. And fraud, in such a world, is mislabeling or unlabelling items – as people will become lazy and assume the virtual world and the real world are the same thing.

All of this will probably eventually be controlled both verbally and kinesthetically. A pair of gloves with multiple sensors, or for those who choose, full sets of clothes are used to give instructions through intricate bodily motions. In the same way that typing is learned, people will learn to control their data devices without even thinking about it, switching fluidly from view to view; changing the information they are transmitting with a quick and nearly unconscious movement of their hands; and creating new functions the same we string words together by the rules of grammar to create sentences we’ve never said before and may never say again, yet which seem to us as nothing special. The motion of pupils will also be tracked, and matched against the gestures of hands to select items visible only in a person’s visor or PDA.

Socially this world will be one where who you know has much less to do with the physical than it does today. This has already begun – many Millenials already have networks of virtual friends spread in a far net geographically. Nor can these friends be dismissed as not “real” friends, they are often truer friends than those who are friends by accident of geography, spending their time and money to help people they know mainly online. Indeed I am, personally, closing in on the point where more of my friends and business associates are people I originally met virtually than ones I met physically. And these are real relationships as measured by both money and time – thousands of dollars and thousands of hours have been spent on them, and earned by them.

My guess is that the most important of these will form out of groups centering around mutual interests and hobbies and form into long enduring networks of reciprocal friendship which will turn into societies with formal dues and duties. I have called these Flash tribes in the past, for the way they will be able to protect their members by quickly dispatching help to their aid and indeed I expect the first forms to be mutual aid societies, where social norms and the sharing of personal dreams that comes so easily in the virtual world leads to strong expectations that members will be there for other members who need help. It is this beginning which made me call them militias or tribes – because they will be tied together at first mainly by custom.

When traveling you will reach out to see who in your tribe lives in the area and can act as a guide, or a host. When doing research you will see who is an expert in your tribe. When doing business you will tend to use members of your tribe first, because you will know that strong social approbation will fall on those who fail to live up to their duties to a tribe member.

Oddly this world, if it turns out as it should and is not locked down by the interests of the modern world into a pattern more suitable to the current day, will also give individuals a great deal more functional freedom. Today the truth is that most people are effectively wage slaves. People work so they can do things after work, not live to work. They are dependent – their food, their energy, their clothes – everything they have, everything they need is completely disassociated from their own efforts, and fewer and fewer are able to independently generate the exchange needed to pay for those items without entering to a situation where most of the value of their work is appropriated by others.

In the new world, a world of microlocal production, or microlocal energy production where every building both consumes and produces energy; a world where design and manufacturing is simplified so that it moves into the reach of small groups of people or households, will allow many more people to actually offer the world whatever it is that they can make and produce. And in a world where the world is your customer – the odds of finding the people who want what you produce increases substantially, since if there are only a few thousand in the entire world that will be enough, while in the past unless those people happened to live near where you lived the market effectively did not exist.

This future – this dream – is something we’ll be discussing more in the future. What I have described is half prediction – half plan. Some of it will happen due to the simple nature of technological change. Other parts can happen or not, the potential is there, but it is not necessary that it turn out that way. There is always a lot of money to be made in monopoly and oligopoly situations and there are always people who will seek to create the bottlenecks, government grants and gates necessary to allow them to take a toll from everyone who wants certain goods or services.

One battle of this generation will be to ensure that those who want to make the future profitable to a few – to the winners of the last fight – are not successful. If they are, a lot of freedom and a lot of prosperity will have to wait, or will be realized elsewhere, by those who cannot afford to allow the past to strangle the future.

Perhaps the more Mother Earth chastises her children, the more the world will turn and look at where we are and who we are…Perhaps there will be a turn back toward nature and preserving the earth rather than raping her with technology.

Interesting read. And who is the “middle class” today? Is that the person who owes nothing to the credit card companies, is not facing forclosure, has health coverage, can put food on the table for his or her family, has good schools for the kids, has job security, etc. I don’t have a clue. I think the middle class is almost a myth.

“Let us dream of what we can do with our technology, soon, very soon. It will be a world where you what you see and hear is what you choose to see and hear.”

Sounds like BushCo. in 2000. Y’know, like, you can write about the new reality, but we’re going to be busy creating it. And so they set up a little world where what they saw and heard is what they wanted to see and hear.

Except that eventually reality came around and bit them on the ass, but good.

Second Life is not for me. I tried it for a few minutes, though.

My model is neither the Hive, nor the cocoon. My model is a community somewhat like FDL– a metaphorical place, where people care about each other, but which is not self-obsessed, caring as much about the external realities of existence. Its true that we haven’t got the utopia gig worked out quite right, but let’s work on it.

The technologies are coming online. How they are used is the question. We are already very close to a panopticon society–all it really requires at this point is good face recognition software and an integrated network. Britain, for one, is very close to this.

Making sure it doesn’t turn dystopian is going to be quite the task. Since right now panopticons are being built so that masses of people can be tracked, by its nature its dystopian.

I am currently working with an emerging technology. Interactive Internal Coherence Interfaces, like the Gizmo I’ve been testing are going to transform civilization in the very near future.

Imagine taking the benefits of personal meditation (Internal Coherence) and concentrating it with the power of a computer. Then ya make the entire process as easy as playing a video game with your friend or lover.

Then you connect the entire process over the Toobz in a chat room module.

I have a standard line: all utopias are really distopias. Always have fatal flaws. I think the gov is already using att the tech to database everything we say & do. More technology will make it even easier for them to persecute us, as they’ll be able to datamine for the evidence they need.

Yep. We’ll be mastered by our gov masters. This is the first technology that allows them to really invade our lives, and if you think there’s any way of stopping them, then you need to stop smoking that funny weed.

Wow not just submit now and save yourself the trouble of struggling, then?

There will be societies where that happens. There may well be societies where it doesn’t happen because the latter will, imo, have significant adaptive advantages (in the same way that in the 30’s totalitarianism seemed more productive (the Soviet industrialization miracle), but it wasn’t.

Slaves aren’t as productive as free men and women. Never have been. Never will be.

Ah yes, the Robot series, with its agoraphobic earthling and people who are in touch with others via screens, not face to face….

This is going to be an interesting time. I fear that it will lead more to dystopia than to the betterment, but it really depends on what people are willing to demand of themselves and their governments. It could lead to fascinating, enriching kinds of group mind, very creative and useful. But if people don’t know themselves and their own limits, and are not committed to justice, it will be a royal mess.

And I think, kiddo, that satellites already CAN look into our houses…..(I can smell your cinnamon rolls from here, by the way!)

Ah, but that is only in one society. What matters is that some societies will take the route of greater freedom so they can beat other societies which have taken the control route. Those at the top may have less power and control, but if they win, they’re still more powerful than the despots who lose.

Note that I’m not predicting which type of society the US will be. We’ll see.

Whenever I think of technological visions of the future, I can’t help but remember Heather Menzies’ (Candian writer) Fast forward and out of control. It addresses a trend in which professional jobs become MacJobs, that includes physicians and librarians and educators. IMHO It’s bad news. Local culture is robbed, etc.

To use a Star Trek analogy, the best way to defeat the Borg is to become Q. The only way they can win is by keeping us from knowing our Eternal Nature. It’s the only way they’ve ever won.

That’s why they were freaked out 40 years ago when folks started messin wit da sugar cubes. Knowing that we are Eternal is bad for certain business interests, like churches and arms manufacturers.

That’s why the churches tell you you can have Eternal Life when you die. They won’t make any money if being Eternal just comes naturally. Same with Guminits. If you are an Eternal being, things like war become pointless, ie unprofitable.

It’s a children’s story, really. The shortage of “warm fuzzies” is an illusion based on rumor. They are making us listen to non stop Limbaugh when there is a better frequency just a little further up the dial.

The people at the top in the losing societies don’t care. Witness Mugabe, to name the extreme.

As you indirectly point out, my comments have been very W & U.S. centric. (And Hillary, too, as I think she’ll be the next prez & will continue all the worst from W.)

Might there be some countries that handle this new powerful technology better? Probably for while, but it’s just sooooo very tempting for those at the top.

BTW, this is the first time I’ve been so pessimistic about technology. I became an economist, but my training was in science. So I know all about how it can be used for good or evil. But as I mentioned, the invasiveness of what you are talking about is the first time gov is offered complete control in a handheld.

We have plenty of technology now yet large numbers of Americans don’t believe in evolution. Every major religion has a strong, fundamentalist movement dedicated to taking the world back to various centuries in the past.

We are facing the imminent arrival of peak oil and it is unlikely that global warming will be addressed in a way to mitigate major consequences from it.

Without some new and carbonless energy source, the carrying capacity of the planet for a high tech society is probably a billion or less.

The biggest users of the new public world appear to be governments intent on spying on their own citizens.

I don’t mean to be a pessimist, but if the most powerful and sophisticated state on the planet can choose 8 years of a leader like Bush then I doubt this shiny chrome future is going to turn out the way it has been described. Rather it will happen for a few. For the rest it will be various degrees of Bladerunner and Thunderdome.

Well “master technology or be mastered by it.”
That is such a complex topic. I would say analyze the impact thoroughly. Too often technology is seen as cost-cutting. Sometimes that is BS. Also technology often puts minorities and persons with disabilities at a disadvantage. Sometimes it helps. Ex: Many persons with visual impairment were fine with text DOS. Windows GUI puts them at a disadvantage.

I’ll be impressed when technology can actually reproduce something completely natural, like an animal or a human or a fruit, without using a part of what it wants to create, in order to create it. Until then, I’ll stick to nature.

The US is no longer the most technologically advanced state. At this point it leads only in biotech and military tech, and some niche areas. The most advanced cars, trains, phonese, internet connections; the most advanced electronics; the most advanced solar and windpower, etc… are all products of other societies.

The US still stands a chance, don’t get me wrong. But it is no longer the undisputed leader in vast areas of technology.

Maybe instead of spending all their time shredding documents, they would spend all their time printing money to pay them off, then they would stick their tongues out at them and say, Nah, Nah, we’ve got the money machines!!

There are several contradictions in this digital utopia Ian Welch describes. There will continue to be competition between different societies and they will continue to have militaries. Well if this can happen transnationally then it can also happen intra-nationally with different parts of societies in fairly violent and vicious conflict with each other.

This reminds me of the debate on globalization. Globalization too is coming but in its current form it is principally made up of unsustainable, get rich quick, show big gains in quarterly profits schemes. The other components of globalization that would stabilize it, such as social justice, worker rights, protection of the environment, have been largely ditched and ridiculed.

So what we end up with is an ideal of globalization as it should or might be and globalization as it is actually playing out. I think the same kind of criticisms could be leveled against this vision of a digital future.

If Ian can describe this world with all these technological improvements, can you imagine the technological improvements these will make in warfare? Because that seems to be also very much a part of our future. Hopefully, the technology will be able to tell us which street is the safest was outta town when things heat up between two armies. Or if streets start to flood or some landslide is threatening to completely submerge a street we’re about to get on, the technology can save us.

My view of globalization is that big, rich corporations all over the world, destroy the middle classes and then use all the poor people all over as slaves to make them richer and use them as servants. They won’t share the wealth, so people will be rich or poor, like all third world countries, and they will be run by corporate dictatorships. It’s not really about trade.

I don’t think the US is the most sophisticated state in the world anymore.

Apples and oranges. Given its position on the global stage and its level of development, that is exactly what it is. Sure, you can point to places like Singapore or Finland but these are tiny. It is rather like taking some upscale neighborhoods in Boston, New York, or Chicago and comparing the Europe of Japan to them. The US is a continent size state and can only be compared reasonably to other continent size states, like Japan, Europe, China, Russia, or India.

Eventually, the rich will be such a small (they already are) group, and everyone else will be so poor that no matter what they sell in their megacorporations, there will be no economy, because they can only sell to each other. Then, what will become valuable once again will be the basic commodities, like agricultural products…and local economy will be where it’s at. The rich will one day end up marginalized…

Nope. Tech to the resue there too. They’ll just have the computers search for the right combination of words (or fallafel purchases, or whatever), plug the “evidence” into te boiler plate legal documents, that the judge’s computer rubber stamps. If they even bother with a procedure, rather than just disappearing you.

That has been the case often in the past, but no so much today. Where Bill Clinton was interested in cutting-edge technologies, Dubya is interested in full-spectrum dominance. The US has been outpaced in stem cell research and related biotechnologies, solar technologies amd general education standards by other first world nations like Norway. When the goverment does not fund and support technology it loses pace. The US has suffered greatly these past seven years and we cannot get those years back. But we are very religious now and more sanctimonious.

As long as the US can print the dollar and the dollar has worldwide value, it is okay, because it can just create a false economy….nowadays that is coming into a major crisis, because of the decline of the dollar. Maybe they need one of them thar Euro printin’ machines!!

Too large a question to do justice to in a comment. But it’s not sustainable, and it’s not working for the US or for large parts of the third world. There are also various variables, like shipping costs, which I expect to go up significantly. Oil is not going to continue to be fungible, as another factor.

But fundamentally, I expect that by 2013 Congress is going to be protectionist. And while the US may not be the world’s most sophisticated society any more, it is still the lynchpin of world trade. When the US dollar goes under, the oil/dollar peg is broken, and so on, the end result is going to be a worldwide recession and possibly even a depression.

Current finance and trade flows are not sustainable. They aren’t going to be sustained. They’re breaking right now. I wouldn’t even be surprised to see currency controls within 5 years.

Bill Clinton was interested in cutting-edge technologies, Dubya is interested in full-spectrum dominance.

One of the first things I noticed about W was how old economy he is. Not just energy, but also aluminum, paper, RR as treas sec. Didn’t understand for a long time how much that a was metaphor for everything he does.

39. Underfunding of basic research. The federal budget for R&D in 2006 (the last year that Republicans held a majority in the Congress) was $132.3 billion. In constant FY 2005 dollars (used hereafter), this broke down to around $73 billion in defense related R&D and $56 billion in non-defense R&D.
Defense R&D increased 2001-2006 from $50 billion to $73 billion. Most of this increase came from weapons development, not basic science. From 2001-2005, defense spending on science and technology (basic research) rose from slightly more than $10 billion to about $13 billion before being cut back to 2001 levels in 2006.
Non-defense R&D initially increased due to a 5 year initiative 1998-2003 (begun during the Clinton years) to double funding for the NIH from approx. $14 billion to $28 billion. After this point NIH funding (which accounts for half of non-defense R&D) stagnated. Non-defense non-NIH funding has remained essentially unchanged since 1992 (or for about 15 years).
While Bush has greatly increased the size of the federal budget, during his tenure funding for basic research which has been the foundation of our technological preeminence has languished or been cut. Democrats since taking control of the Congress have made some moves to increase funding in the 2008 budget.

What this is saying is that minus the increased funding for the NIH which has also now plateaued investment in basic research has been stagnant in constant dollars for the last 15 years. One of the reasons that we are not as cutting edge as we once were is that we are not investing in the research that produces it.

I think one thing this vision is not taking into consideration is the coming extreme shortage of cheap energy. We’re already seeing it, and it is going to intensify. All of this technology is dependent on energy to get it up and running. What happens when oil is 100 per gallon? What happens when the electrical grid goes down?

Our visors will go dark. Then we will get a chance to understand meaningful work. It’ll be called: growing and foraging enough food to stay alive.

If only nations with the best technologies will be in control in the future, and America is no longer a leader in technology now, what then, is the solution? Are we, in this country headed for ‘techno third-worldism’? Are we doomed?

I’m afraid I don’t. I know there is a SciFi book set in the near future which has a goggled future, but I forget the author and name (nor have a I read it.) In general this is an extrapolation of where the tech is going/could easily go. UPC codes are an early version of this, in a sense.

The best antonym for Globalization is Localization. The American economy in particular runs good on cheap oil. Cheap is the key word. Expensive oil is really screwing up the globalization ballgame. As oil becomes even more expensive, the economy will crash. No one is prepared. No politician dares to talk about it b/c it is political suicide (the truth usually is). Mass transit is key. Local production will be key to a new system. Chaos will likely come first.

You’re on target, kiddo … I’ve just been looking at the real results of Smoot-Hawley and beyond. And I’m seeing people now commenting other places
about needing ‘draconian tariffs’.

Implementing tariffs is one of those ideas that seem like a good idea at the time. Unfortunately, it’s never unilateral. By the time the Great Depression tariff war ended, we had 34 countries fighting back aggressively. The end result for US auto exports was loss of almost total market in Spain and Italy, for one inconvenient example.

Free trade, done right, overall benefits everyone. Done wrong (and we’ve been doing it very wrong) it is very harmful to a lot of people. Because we’ve been doing it wrong, losing it won’t necessarily be a bad thing, though because we are going to lose it due to economic bad times, it’ll be hard to sort out.

Free trade is something I support, but only in a world where currency flows are mostly trade related and there isn’t a massive speculative currency market. (I wrote an article on this for FDL.)

Compare it to the EU then. Better transportation network, more advanced trains, better telecomunications network, more advaned in solar and windpower, etc…

The US is only one of a number of major societies now. This is going to become very clear in the next few years.

Again this misses the point. There are pockets in Europe which are doing very well just as there are in this country but there are other regions such as Poland, Romania, etc. that aren’t doing as well. And even in advanced countries like Germany there are great discrepancies between the old West and East Germany. Same thing for the UK. London is a powerful nexus but has many inequalities within it. At the same time, old industrial areas in the North and the Midlands are doing less well.

Also if you cherrypick sectors within a country you can skew the data even further. It is important, as I said, to compare similar economic states or entities, the EU to the US for example and you need to look at them across the board, not just a few categories.

While solar is a good renewable it is at best an adjunct. It is not going to solve energy shortfalls either here or in Europe. France and Belgium are heavily into nuclear but where is the rest of Europe in terms of dealing with peak oil?

I don’t think the energy grid will go down. California went down, because they made it go down. While I totally believe Global Warming is a major crisis and needs to be addressed now….I also suspect that the same people that brought us Enron, Iraq, etc., are inflating the energy values, by exaggerating (lying) about what is available to us. They are a relatively small cabal, and when they are gone, if we could get someone in power who actually cares about the world and our country, things will settle down. They only make money on what is perceived of as “rare”….does anyone follow what I’m saying…I’m ducking under the table in case any molotov cocktails get lobbed….*G*

The US was lending those countries money to buy US goods. Smoot Hawley was misguided, but it did less damage than folks think, because the pre-Depression trade regime was completely subsidized by American loans that other countries were finding unsustainable.

My view is that we need to radically ramp up education. We need to turn out people in math, engineering, science and liberal arts. The way to dig ourselves out of this economic hole we find ourselves in is through education. This will make us competitive again.

LS, I think the energy cabal are lying about oil reserves, but not in the way you think. I believe they are painting a rosy picture, plenty of oil, as long as they get the greenlight to drill in artic national wildlife refuge etc; the reason they’d lie is because they continue to get huge tax breaks to continue the system as is. Oil companies are making staggering profits. If the truth were out, that all the cheap readily available oil has already been extracted, and that anything left is going to be increasing difficult and expensive to extract, people, governments, would start madly putting money and effort into other technologies.

Argh, reading another blog about the mortgage market ‘repair’: “The plan from the Fed, which has regulatory powers over the nation’s financial system, could be finalized next year.”

It just makes me want to smash pottery or glassware. That damn best/worst example of privatization!

And another thing! How come none of the economic/financial pundits saw this train wreck coming? Same as for Enron, those “smartest guys in the room”. And now the mortgage mess is ‘conventional wisdom’ and they can all analyse to their heart’s content and tell us what some people have been saying for a long time. Bah!

I see your point and I agree with you, but I think that you are talking about a smaller picture concept (not that it isn’t relevant – it is). Big Picture is we are running out of oil, it will become too expensive to run the American economy in the same way.

Yes! EW has a post on it too. There are some informed comments over there by people in the know…they want access to the “local” switch centers or something..all the better to blackmail you (if you are a politician)…

But, you are sort of saying what I mean…they actually are making a case that we need oil so badly because there is none, and that we have to drill in Alaska, the Gulf, the Atlantic, the Pacific….all so that they can make more profit, because they don’t have to ship it from the M.E. Of course, they want control of the M.E. oil, and the North Sea oil, and other oil, because they are friggin’ meglomaniacs. They whine about not having refineries, so the price has to be high….meanwhile, the whiners are the profiteers. They are lying through their teeth. They never, ever tell the truth.

The best thing to happen is to develop ecofriendly energy, just for the mere fact of taking away their monopoly on….everything. They are full of it. They are making shit up about the oil too.

And another thing! How come none of the economic/financial pundits saw this train wreck coming?

The pundits may not have foreseen it but Ian and a lot of us out here saw it coming at least a couple of years ago. Bubbles are not hard to recognize, sort of like picking out an 800 lb gorilla walking down your street. Pundits don’t see them because their jobs depend on their not seeing them.

Seems to me the ultimate problem is two fold: one: overpopulation, which is directly related to cheap energy (industrial agriculture, increased food production leading to increased population); and greed – over consumption. No explanation needed there. Most of us can just look around to see the truth of that.

Most of our politicians are so unbelievably stupid. The solution for the world’s economy is staring us right in the face. The solution lies in protecting Mother Earth, through development of technology. Geesh.

While oil companies are not exactly hurting, their profits are down because they have not been able to pass on the full cost of increased crude oil prices. They would need to increase gasoline prices higher than they currently are but then this cuts into consumption.

It’s important to remember that as much as we love to hate the oil companies and as much as they deserve it 70-75% of crude oil production is controlled by national oil companies. The percentage of what we call the “oil companies” continues to slip.

Ultimately, oil producing countries and various middlemen are the big winners in the current bid up of oil prices. Hedge funds have entered into the fray and pushed prices higher but they make their money not on what the price of oil is at any given moment but on the differential in prices between today and tomorrow or between this week and next week. Of course, a high priced commodity also gives them collateral to borrow against so in that way high prices do help them.

I think that 6.8 percent is not nearly accurate. That might represent the worst of the worst. What would you or I consider sub-prime? How about an adjustable rate mortgage – I have one. My monthly PITI increased by 33 percent last year. I got a triple whammy – higher interest, higher insurance, higher prop tax. I’m ok, but some people simply can’t (aren’t) make(ing) the payments on those types of loans.

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. Is that book, Ian. Barcoded citizens, Corporate sub nations, and the Grid as the all encompassing joiner of the world. Distopia and yet some of the coolist satirical cyberpunk i’ve ever read. But it struck me on just how close were to that when i read it in the late 90s, and we’re a step away from it now with W in power. Despite his repression of new tech, the stuff he does like? Is right in line with the setting of Snow Crash.

In the new world, a world of microlocal production, or microlocal energy production where every building both consumes and produces energy; a world where design and manufacturing is simplified so that it moves into the reach of small groups of people or households, will allow many more people to actually offer the world whatever it is that they can make and produce. And in a world where the world is your customer – the odds of finding the people who want what you produce increases substantially, since if there are only a few thousand in the entire world that will be enough, while in the past unless those people happened to live near where you lived the market effectively did not exist.

Considering that with the end of the Oil Age, those big-ass container vessels will be increasingly expensive, (and likely a lot slower, if they have to rely mostly on wind power again), suddenly manufacturing in China and shipping everywhere else is no longer the cheapest option for CEOs looking to maximize their own swimming pools while yanking the rug out from under the local unions.

Technology has leap-froged human ability to adapt. I hear in your picture – I world I almost might like to live in – talk of co-operation and co-existance.

While a recent article said that human evolution was speeding up, we still have not even begun to adapt social structures to the technological advances. TEchnology had in fact disassembled soucisty with no reconstruct instructions anywhere to be seen. We are all able to be discrete little units with no need to connect in meaningful ways.

The generation that is now 21 (account for generational parameters) will be more able to create the social structures to which you allude, but they do not take control for another 30 years. (give or take))

I certainly wish you well in this new world. I probably won’t be around to see it this time around.

If one does not dream they have no future, so good luck with your dream.

At the end of the horse & buggy era there were financial interests which wanted that status quo to remain, but the freedom of the market place allowed alternatives to win that ‘competition’. Today I don’t sense that the powerful financial interests are so easily defeated. They can’t stand the heat of real competition.

So, yes, we do need education, technology, great political leadership and working together with other peoples from around the globe.

Thus, ask yourself, what is making our education system dysfunctional? Ask, what technologies do we need most? Ask, who do we need to lead? And, ask, what international relations do we need to smooth out or create from scratch?

The analogy I would use is the switch from the coal economy to the oil economy. Britain basically didn’t do it till after WWII (with primarily military exc exceptions), the US did it as soon as it could. My guess is that powerful interests in the US will strangle the change in the US and that some other nation or nations will do it and reap the benefits, because the status quo interests in their country aren’t as relatively powerful.